Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) November 7, 2016: My favorite
scholar is the American Jesuit polymath Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in
English, Harvard University, 1955). Over the years, I took five courses from
him at Saint Louis University (SLU), the Jesuit university in St. Louis,
Missouri, that was founded in 1818.

My thesis is that Ong is a deeply original
philosopher and theologian, and one of the most original, to have emerged in Western culture thus far, most
notably in the following four book-length studies:

(1) Ramus, Method, and
the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason
(Harvard University Press, 1958), the main text of his slightly revised Harvard
University doctoral dissertation in English about the history of formal logic
and rhetoric in Western culture;

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(2) The Presence of
the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale
University Press, 1967), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at
Yale University;

(3) Fighting for Life:
Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), the
published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University;

(4) Hopkins, the Self,
and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986), the published version of Ong's
1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.

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Before Ong entered the Jesuit order in 1935, he had been
educated by Jesuits in high school and college, and he studied philosophy as an
undergraduate at Rockhurst College (now Rockhurst University) in Kansas City,
Missouri. As part of his lengthy Jesuit training, he did graduate studies in
Thomistic philosophy and theology (in Latin) and also earned a Master's in
English at SLU, before he later proceeded to Harvard University for his
doctoral studies in English.

In general, Jesuits have been and still are exceptionally
well educated. But their anti-Jesuit detractors coined the pejorative term
"jesuitical" to call attention to their lawyer-like tendency to make fine
distinctions.

The Jesuit religious order of men (known formally as the
Society of Jesus) was founded in 1540 by St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556).
Within the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Julius III approved the new religious
order in the papal bull Exposcit debitum
in 1540 and subsequently confirmed it in the papal bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae in 1550.

St. Ignatius Loyola is also famous for his compilation of
guided meditations known as the Spiritual
Exercises of Saint Ignatius, translated by the American Jesuit classicist
George E. Ganss (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992) and for his Constitutions of the Society of Jesus,
also translated by Ganss (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970).

Certain early Jesuits became famous as missionaries to
distant places including India and China, but other Jesuits stayed in Europe
and established Jesuit colleges there. In a comparatively short time, the
Jesuits had established so many colleges that they felt that they needed to
coordinate their curricular efforts. As a result, they compiled the document in
Latin known as the Ratio Studiorum of
1599, translated into English by the American Jesuit classicist Claude Pavur as
The Ratio Studiorum : The Official Plan for Jesuit Education
(St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005).

Ong, himself a Renaissance specialist, connects Jesuit
education with Renaissance humanism in his 1967 encyclopedia article on
"Humanism," which is reprinted in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pages 69-92).

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However, despite the ostensible successes of the Jesuits,
Pope Clement XIV formally suppressed the Jesuit order in 1773. But later on,
Pope Pius VII restored the order in 1814.

In John T. McGreevy's fast-paced and at times vividly
written book American Jesuits and the
World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global
(Princeton University Press, 2016), the author focuses on the restoration
period from 1814 to 1914, but without totally neglecting the rest of the
twentieth century and the twenty-first century. As OEN readers know, Donald J.
Trump, the Republican Party's 2016 presidential candidate, has difficulty
staying on point. But McGreevy has no difficulty staying on point.

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)